If These Walls Could Talk: Researching House Histories

Are you one of our community’s many “house-proud” residents curious about their home’s past? In February 2018, nationally known land title expert and educator Joe Grabas shared tips on the variety of ways to research a house’s history. Techniques range from architectural and archaeological analysis, to newspapers, census and genealogical records, wills, inventories, dendrochronology, liens, obscure sources, such as tavern records, coroner’s reports, bankruptcies, etc. The basics of a house’s story starts with the investigation of county land records to establish what is called the chain of title. Once this is done, homeowners can embark upon other avenues of research.

Asher B. Durand's Life in Art: From Jefferson Village to Maplewood

During his multi-faceted six-decade-long career, renowned Hudson River School founder Asher B. Durand truly lived a life in art - as an engraver and then as a painter, first of portraits and ultimately of landscape. In all three endeavors - engraving, portraiture, and landscape painting - Durand played a major role in the art of his time by creating resonant images that contributed to an emerging American national and cultural identity.

Born in 1796 in a homestead on the corner of what is now Ridgewood and Durand Roads, Durand left Maplewood to pursue his career as an artist in New York, but returned to the family property in retirement, and built an impressive house with a studio atop it. He lived there until his death in 1886. (The original family home burned down in 1843; Durand's new home was taken down in the early 20th century.)

The Durand-Hedden House was pleased to host a presentation by prominent art historian and Durand expert Dr. Linda S. Ferber. In 2007, Dr. Ferber organized the first major retrospective in thirty-five years devoted to Durand’s career: Kindred Spirits: Asher B Durand and the American Landscape for the Brooklyn Museum, where she was the Andrew Mellon Curator of American Art and Chief Curator from 1970 to 2005. From 2005 through 2013, she served as Vice President and Museum Director at the New-York Historical Society (now Emerita.)

From Farm to Suburb: The Birth of College Hill

College Hill is one of Maplewood’s most clearly identifiable neighborhoods due to its roster of collegiate street names: Amherst, Bowdoin, Colgate, Harvard, Oberlin, Rutgers, Wellesley and Yale. (Cornell was in the plans, but later dropped.) However, the use of the moniker “College Hill” only dates back to the 1990s, when a group of neighbors formed the College Hill Association. This section of town, like many in Maplewood, began originally as a farm, in this case a dairy farm worked for three generations by the Courter family. In the late 19th century, as American society began to change and many sought to leave crowded, industrialized cities for the country, developers began to buy and divide up land in places like Maplewood with easy access to roads and railroads. In 1898 the Trimpi brothers, two successful businessmen in Newark and New York, purchased much of the Courter acreage and began to transform it into the suburban Trimpi tract, which they named Valley View. The first seven houses, designed by architect W. Frank Bower in the Queen Anne and Four Square styles, were scattered throughout the development. Over subsequent decades, other individuals and developers bought lots and built houses in popular early and mid-20th c. styles and knit together the neighborhood we know today.